Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Feb 2002 by Dell Magazines

Author:Dell Magazines
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction/Fantasy
Publisher: www.Fictionwise.com
Published: 2001-04-14T22:00:00+00:00

The Day the Cat Got Out...by David K. Harford

The Day the Cat Got Out, the Ducks Got in, and the Dog Died

I never dreamed I'd be living up here.

I'd only been out of that god-awful prison a few months when Lew and me moved into this camp up Mountain View Hollow.

It was an art heist gone haywire that got me two and a half years in that federal prison up near Bradford, but it was overcrowding and good behavior that got me out on parole early.

The old weatherbeaten clapboard hunting camp belonged to my deceased father's brother out in Ohio somewhere. I hardly even knew him, but because he was getting on in age and rarely humped these steep northwestern Pennsylvania mountains hunting any more, and knew Lew and me needed someplace to squat, he let us move in free. All I had to pay was the electric bill. ‘Course, everything in the place is electric except the heat, which is a wood stove. No TV or phone either. So, it's been rugged living, especially for Lew.

But there's a real sense of peacefulness and freedom living up this hollow, in these mountains; a freedom and peace I never knew in the federal stir I was in, confined with the likes of that disgusting Ollie West, my cellmate for a while until they threw him into solitary, and having to put up with nasty guards like John “Mr. Big” Bigley and all the others who tormented and bullied me. So I liked the freedom of Mountain View Hollow a lot right off. And I learned to like it more and more as time went on.

Besides me and Lew (Lew's my younger brother who can't hear, reads lips, and talks only by signing), the only other permanent residents up this hollow are old Ma “The Sarge” Duncan on her sprawling farm at the top of the hill, which, I suppose, is where the hollow got its name—she's got one hell of a sweeping view across the entire Allegheny mountain range from up there—and, of course, there's Bob, who lives a half mile farther up the hollow, past me on the right.

Bob's retired out of Pittsburgh, where most of his family still lives. It was while we were staying at his place taking care of his animals that all that shooting and killing and everything else went on, which is what I'm setting out to tell you about.

The four of us (me, Lew, Ma Duncan, and Bob) are like a family isolated in the shady folds of these mountains. We take care of each other, especially in the winter when we get snowed in, separated from the outside world. It's good to have family.

The rest of the buildings along the dirt road, which splits the mountains like a peach pit, are hunting camps—about a dozen of them sitting empty most of the year. A couple of them camps don't have nobody come to them ever.

It's all right with me that they stand empty

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